Writers and readers know that good dialogue is crucial to a novel’s success. It helps define characters, moves the plot along, and adds credibility to the story and setting. Bad dialogue, on the other hand, will stop a reader in his or her tracks. Guest blogger Eric D. Goodman will examine some of the secrets of good dialogue in this space on December 1. When he’s not blogging for Late Last Night Books, Eric writes about trains, wombs, and animals gone wild. He’s the author of Tracks: A Novel in Stories and Flightless Goose, a storybook for children.

11/26/14 Tom Williams has published two novels, The Mimic’s Own Voice and Don’t Start Me Talkin’. His short story collection, Among The Wild Mulattos, will appear in Spring 2015 from Texas Review Press. The Chair of English at Morehead State University, he lives in Kentucky with his wife and children.

Don’t Start Me Talkin’ is a novel about Brother Ben, billed as the Last of the True Delta Bluesmen—but is he? Born in Mississippi, certainly, and purveyor of “authentic” delta blues, far from being the near-illiterate, hard-drinking, womanizing country boy he purports to be, Brother Ben turns out to be a vegetarian, Volvo-driving health fanatic, who listens to jazz for pleasure, is actually an accomplished jazz guitarist, and an extremely savvy and sophisticated manager of his own business—which he manages under his own real name, Wilton Mabry.

Google the word humunculus (or homunculus) for a definition of the “little man” and you’re sent spinning in a dozen directions from the alchemy of Paracelsus who was born the year after Columbus sailed for the New World, to Louise Erdrich’s 2001 The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse, to neurobiologist Christof Koch’s 2013 NPR interview.

11/20/14 “It is rather funny I think,” wrote Barbara Pym in 1939 of her novel-in-progress, Crampton Hodnet. The war prevented her from pursuing publishers, and after the war she felt the book was dated and turned her attention to another of her novels. As a result, Crampton Hodnet wasn’t published until 1985, among the last of her works to appear. Every now and then I re-read one of the thirteen novels of Pym, among my favorite novelists, a master of postwar English humor and ahead of her time in her views of male-female relationships.

Writing is a vocation of exploration, whether of ideas and feelings, wishes and dreams, or places and events. According to my dictionary, the word, “explore,” means “traveling through (a country, etc.) to learn about it. 2. Inquire into.” At heart, I am an explorer, and writing is the perfect occupation.

So as I begin my fifth novel, which will involve an old clock and the underground railroad, I first explored the Internet to inquire

Mr. McSwain’s debut novel was published in September, and is an ambitious step into the horror genre. He shares with us the experience of crafting his story, and some of the secrets on where his ideas are born.

Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson starts with a shock and ends with an even bigger shock. Set in the tiny town of Possett, Alabama, the story is a classic example of Southern Gothic literature, which includes works by Flannery O’Connor (the queen of Southern Gothic), William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Carson McCullers. You can tell a story is Southern Gothic by its preponderance of violence, weird characters, loners, ghosts, and other grotesque occurrences in any and all combinations. Jackson’s protagonist, Arlene Fleet, fulfills most of these requirements all by herself.

I’ve been to a lot of book club meetings in my day, but never one quite like this, never one where the stakes were so high. This wasn’t going to be a casual conversation about books with a group of friends; this was going to be a conversation with eight strangers about a book that meant everything to me: Hawke’s Point, my debut novel published last summer. Was I nervous? You bet.

Serial novelist Pallas Snider Ziporyn (who, full disclosure, also happens to be my daughter) tells all about the trials and tribulations of “playing the indie publishing game” and trying to make her book free on Amazon.

I have been thinking about what a historical novel is, because the novel I am working on is set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If we follow the dictum that a novel is ‘historical’ if set before the author’s birth, then mine clearly is, since I was born in 1955, almost twenty years after the very end of the action in the novel. And yet I feel a resistance to considering it a historical novel. No doubt this is partly owing to the stigma that pertains even now to historical fiction–I say even now since the genre is ever more popular–but also, I think, because I often reject the appellation altogether.

Given lemons, make lemonade. M. L. Doyle is no longer a Late Last Night Books blogger, so I’m taking advantage of our loss by reviewing her latest book, something I couldn’t have done while she was one of us. Whether in or out of uniform, press corps Army Sergeant Lauren Harper faces the problems of today’s Every Woman as she is drawn into a murder investigation. Her direct superior in the press corps, now divorced and without his family, imposes his affections upon her. He wants to marry her, rather than to be her best friend. Lauren once longed for this but thought it could never be. But is she in love with him now?

I’ve been working on my latest novel, tentatively entitled In the Rembrandt’s Shadow, which alternates chapters set in 1999 with chapters following a painting’s provenance from 1616 to 1930. I feel as though I’m walking in a mine field of anachronisms on every page.

For instance, when were cell phones invented? My characters use them in 1999, and, yes, they were available then, but expensive. In fact, the first cell phones were released to the public in 1983 by Motorola and cost about $4,000. By 1999, they’d become smaller and somewhat more affordable, so it’s reasonable to suppose my characters had them.

If you like a good mystery, wrapped in a little science fiction, laced with lots of violence, and tied together with the ultimate evil, then Monsters All The Way Down,Ryan McSwain’s debut novel, is for you.

What do you do when you read a novel? Relax, maybe, leisurely turning pages, letting the story sweep you along? If so, you’re likely reading solely for pleasure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Reading is a lot of fun. Enjoying the story can be reward enough.

On the other hand, what if you want more than entertainment from the novels you read? Good stories have layers, offering ideas, feelings, and meanings. Even fairy tales are more than delightful yarns. Hansel and Gretel learn not to wander off into the woods alone. The three little pigs learn to build their houses with strong materials that will last. If you want to mine the stories you read for greater understanding of the world the writer has created, here are some suggestions you might consider.

Change seems to be the only constant in the world of publishing these days. In just the last few years, the big traditional publishers have consolidated, most have entered the digital competition, and some have gone to war with Amazon. We’ve seen exponential growth in ebook sales, and thousands of authors are publishing their own work.

Almost unnoticed in the turmoil has been a huge opportunity for small, independent presses. They appeal to authors who don’t want to self-publish and can’t attract the interest of the big guys.

We so often hear that the age of independent bookstores is over. With the rise of Amazon and other online sellers, we have even seen the fall of the very chains that were supposed to be putting small-town, independent bookstores out of business – putting the future of all physical bookstores, independent or otherwise, into question.